Tell Me Who I Am

  “Sister, we need medicine,” Grazyna whispered in Maria’s ear.

  “I can’t give you any more, we’ll get found out,” the nun said.

  “There are children in a terrible state... It’s difficult to control the outbreaks of typhoid in the ghetto,” Grazyna replied.

  “If we get found out it will be worse, because you won’t be able to take any more medicine,” Sister Maria replied.

  “Yes, I know, but I need these medicines...”

  “I’m going to take Amelia out to see the children’s ward, we’ll be gone for ten minutes.”

  “Thank you,” Grazyna murmured gratefully.

  When Amelia and Sister Maria left the infirmary, Grazyna opened the box where the nun kept the keys and took out the ones for the dispensary. When they returned, Sister Maria looked worriedly at the bulky bag in Grazyna’s hand.

  “But how much are you taking? We’ve got an inspection here tomorrow, and you know what they’re like; they’ve got the inventory written down to the last sticking plaster. What am I going to tell them?”

  “Say that the inventory must have been wrong.”

  “That’s what I told them the last time... They transferred me for lack of diligence and for allowing medicines to leave the dispensary without being noted down.”

  “But the mother superior has never given you an official warning...”

  “No, but she doesn’t want to know anything about what I do, she says that the less she knows the better. Anyway, she doesn’t know how to lie, the poor thing.”

  “Come to the ghetto one day and see how they need what we bring them! There are doctors there, but they have nothing to help them cure people with, and they are crying with impotence when they see people dying.”

  “Get out, get out before I change my mind. I need to think up a lie to justify the disappearance of all this medicine.”

  They went out into the street, which smelled of summer; the sun was shining in a cloudless sky.

  “Let’s go to my house; Piotr will come to find us when it gets dark. God willing, we’ll be able to get into the ghetto tonight and bring them this,” Grazyna said, indicating the bag.

  “Let me go with you,” Amelia asked.

  “You’re crazy! It’s impossible. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “I could be useful, I could send information about the ghetto back to London, I think they’re not aware of just how far the Nazis are taking their hatred of the Jews.”

  Grazyna was silent for a moment, thinking about what Amelia had said.

  “I’ll only take you if the others agree.”

  Piotr and Tomasz were doubtful, but Ewa and Grazyna managed to convince them.

  “The British are not entirely clear about what the ghetto is like, it will help us if Amelia can tell them about it,” Grazyna argued.

  “At least they will have some first-hand information,” Ewa said.

  By the time night began to fall Piotr had been won over, and before the curfew was sounded they separated and made their own way to Countess Lublin’s house. Grazyna took the medicine, and Tomasz and Ewa took bags that seemed to weigh more than Grazyna’s.

  Piotr let them in through a service door that gave onto a hall that ended in a swing door into the kitchen. There were three rooms for the staff at the other end of the hall. Piotr was lucky enough to have a room all to himself, as he was the only man in the house; the other two rooms were for the countess’s cook and maid, and they shared them if necessary.

  “I don’t need to tell you that you shouldn’t make any noise, and that you shouldn’t leave my room under any circumstances. The servants probably hate the Nazis, but I don’t want to take any risks,” Piotr warned them.

  Grazyna, Tomasz, and Ewa went to Piotr’s room followed by Amelia. It was a small room, with barely enough space for a bed, a table and a wardrobe. They sat on the bed and waited for Piotr to come back.

  Amelia was going to ask something, but Tomasz made a sign for her to keep quiet.

  After they had waited in the room a good while, Piotr came back. He looked tired.

  “The countess has guests, and there was nothing I could do apart from wait for them to leave. We need to wait a bit more and then go out, silently. You know what you have to do,” he said, addressing his friends, “and you, Amelia, just follow us, but whatever you do, don’t make any noise or say a word.”

  The night was sprinkled with stars. The sky over Warsaw seemed to have patches of light in it still, which did not bode well for them being able to move calmly, so they moved fast. Piotr lifted the drain cover and motioned for his friends to enter the city’s underbelly. Tomasz was the first to go down the narrow iron stairs into the sewers. He was followed by Ewa and Grazyna, and Amelia brought up the rear.

  Piotr put the cover back on the drain and went back to his room. He could not go with them that night. The countess was unpredictable and could call him at any moment. Ever since she had been widowed, she had used him to ease her nights, and he had accepted this duty, knowing that it gave him a privileged position among the other servants. She never told him in advance, but he knew from the way she looked at him when the summons would come.

  But whatever happened that night, he would have to make sure that the drain cover was opened exactly four hours later, which was the length of time that his friends would stay in the ghetto.

  Amelia had to stop herself from vomiting. The smell was unbearable. They walked over the rotting core of Warsaw, dodging rats, their feet sinking into the dirty water that filled the drainage system that went from one side of the city to the other.

  Tomasz led the way, followed by Grazyna and Ewa, with Amelia at the back. A rat ran between her legs and she shrieked. Ewa turned back to her, saw the rodent and took Amelia’s hand.

  “It’s better not to look at them,” she said.

  “And what if they bite us?” Amelia managed to say.

  Ewa shrugged and pulled Amelia along by her hand. Tomasz had sped up, and so had Grazyna, and Ewa couldn’t lose sight of them.

  They didn’t walk far; it only took them fifteen minutes, but to Amelia it seemed like an eternity. Then Tomasz stopped and pointed out some old iron stairs. He went up first. He knocked twice on the drain cover and someone opened it. A hand took Tomasz’s and pulled him up. Then the rest had their turns.

  “Hurry up, the soldiers will pass by soon,” a man said, whose face was almost invisible in the night shadows.

  He took them to a nearby building where another man was waiting impatiently in the doorway.

  “You’re late.”

  They went up to the fourth floor, the top floor of the building, where a man was waiting on a landing in front of a barely lit room.

  “Thank God you’re here!” a woman said, coming out to meet them. “And who is this?”

  “She’s a friend of ours who may be of some use. She speaks German, but she’s Spanish,” Grazyna explained.

  “Have you brought medicine?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, but not much, it was impossible for me to steal more.”

  The woman impatiently opened the bag that Grazyna gave her. Amelia looked at her. She must have been sixty or a little more, she was very thin, with her gaunt face covered in wrinkles, and white threatening to overtake the black in her hair, which she wore tied up with a bow; her eyes were very blue.

  “It’s not enough,” the woman said, looking at what Grazyna had brought.

  “I’m sorry, I’ll try to bring more the next time,” Grazyna apologized.

  Amelia looked at Tomasz and Ewa, who were at the back of the room talking to the man who had led them there.

  “Where is Szymon?” Grazyna asked impatiently.

  “My son will be here any moment. He’s in the hospital.”

  “Do you have a hospital here?” Amelia asked.

  “It’s not really a hospital, more a space where we put the people who are the most ill. My son is a doctor,” the woman said in Ger
man.

  “Sarah is Szymon’s mother,” Grazyna said by way of introduction.

  “And now my son is madly in love with a guy,” Sarah laughed as she took Grazyna’s hand and led them to where Tomasz and Ewa were talking to the other men.

  “This is Barak, Szymon’s brother, and this is Rafal,” Grazyna said, introducing the men to Amelia. “They make sure that our children still study, in spite of the war.”

  Ewa had opened her bag, which was filled with sweets and pastries.

  “The children love the cakes you make,” Rafal said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t bring more, but it is difficult to carry a bag without calling the soldiers’ attention to you.”

  “We should bring more bags,” Tomasz said.

  “They call too much attention to themselves; I prefer that you just bring what you can and avoid getting arrested.” Sarah said.

  Tomasz’s bag was filled with teaching material: notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers... He was a teacher and some of the children in the ghetto had been pupils of his. Rafal had been a music teacher in the same school where Tomasz was still a teacher. They had been friends for too many years to let the German invasion break their friendship.

  “I was just saying to Tomasz and Ewa that they’ve reduced the amount of food they allow into the ghetto, again. They say that 184 calories per person per day are enough. They are starving us to death. We have set up canteens where we distribute some soup that we make with whatever we can to the people who need it the most. But the worst thing of all is the lack of medicine, we have to get more.” Rafal’s tone was desperate.

  “I will do it, but I’m afraid they will find me out. Sister Maria is very good and turns a blind eye to what we do, but one of these days she is going to be interrogated, and although I know that she won’t give me up, they’ll take the key to the pharmacy away from her,” Grazyna replied.

  “Szymon is desperate, he says that he can’t bear to see the children dying without being able to do anything for them, just because of not having the necessary medicine,” Rafal continued.

  Some gentle knocks on the door put them all on the alert. Sarah went to open it and kissed the man who had just arrived.

  “Mother, is Grazyna here?”

  “Come in, son, she’s at the other end of the room.”

  Szymon came in and went straight to where Grazyna was, and hugged her tight. They held each other close for a few seconds, then sat with the others. Grazyna introduced Amelia, and she was surprised to see how much the two brothers, Barak and Szymon, looked like their mother. Dark-haired, bony, thin, and with the same intense blue eyes.

  “We have to do something, we can’t carry on like this,” Szymon complained.

  “But what can we do? They watch the ghetto night and day, there’s no way to get out except for those they take off to work,” his brother Barak replied.

  “The other day an SS officer had a party and took some of our best musicians,” Rafal added.

  “We need to get food and medicine. Maybe our brothers in Palestine will be able to help us. We need to get in touch with the delegation in Geneva or Constantinople. We might be able to bribe one of these Nazi pigs to help us get food and bring it into the ghetto,” Szymon insisted.

  “You’re crazy! They’ll report us and keep the money. But you’re right that we should get in touch with the Jewish community in Palestine, or in America, and see if they will help us,” Rafal said.

  “Our organization will do what it can, Szymon, you know that,” Barak said.

  “I don’t care about politics, my brother, all I want to do is save our people.”

  “For all that you claim the opposite, politics is everything, Szymon. The situation in the ghetto would be much worse if we did nothing,” Barak said.

  “The ghetto would be in a much worse situation if it weren’t for the Judenrat, you have to admit it,” Sarah said, looking straight at Szymon.

  “I think that you’re wasting your time, trying to make life in the ghetto normal instead of thinking of ways to face the Nazis,” Szymon protested.

  “Even behind the walls and behind the barbed wire we have to carry on being people, and people need more than bread to live,” Sarah scolded him.

  “We have to keep the children entertained,” Rafal added.

  “Poor things, it makes me sad to see them pretending to be normal in your schools.” Szymon was still protesting.

  “What should we tell them, then? That there’s no hope?” Barak was annoyed with his brother.

  Szymon was going to reply, but Grazyna spoke first.

  “I understand your pessimism, but you’re not right; life still goes on, even here in the ghetto, and our duty is to make sure that it continues, as if nothing were different in spite of the difficulties and the suffering. The Judenrat does what it can, and thanks to them everything works, more or less, and people feel protected.”

  “I saw five people die this afternoon, two of them children, and their mothers came to me crying: They asked me to do something to save them. You can imagine how I felt,” Szymon whispered.

  Grazyna held him tight and tried to contain her tears. Amelia didn’t dare say anything, so affected was she by the scene that was taking place.

  There were some more soft knocks on the door, which set them on edge again. Sarah got up and went to open the door. They heard a woman’s voice, sobbing, asking for Szymon.

  “What’s happening?” Szymon asked the woman.

  “You have to come, my husband is dying, you have to give him something, the cloths with cold water are doing nothing to lower his fever,” the woman begged.

  “I’ll come with you, I’ll see what can be done.”

  “Be careful, the curfew sounded a while ago and the soldiers shoot without asking any questions,” Sarah said.

  Szymon and Grazyna fell into each other’s arms again. Then Szymon went with the woman, who told him to hurry.

  “Complaints don’t help anyone. Can you carry on bringing us what we need?” Barak asked Tomasz.

  “You know that our organization is doing what it can, we’ll try to come back in a couple of days with a few sacks of flour and some rice.”

  “A couple of days... Well, what can you do? We’ll just have to wait. There’s nothing left of what you brought the last time,” Rafal replied.

  “It’s not easy to bring sacks of flour through the streets of Warsaw,” Ewa interrupted.

  “We know, and we’re grateful for all that you are doing for us. What’s happening here is so difficult for us to understand... We’re trapped here as if we were filthy animals, and if this carries on for much longer then that’s what we’ll be,” Rafal said, bitterly.

  “Rafal, what a thing to say!” Sarah scolded him. “I don’t want to hear you talk like that. We’ll get out of here, the Nazis can’t keep us locked away for ever; while we’re waiting we need to organize ourselves as best we can.”

  “Mother, you were born in Palestine, and you lived there until you met our father. If one of us managed to escape and got over there, who could we turn to?” Barak asked.

  “Escape... I wish we could escape and get to Palestine! But I think that the best thing to do would be to get news of our situation to the Jewish offices in Geneva... That’s what we should do.”

  “We could get out of the ghetto through the sewers... ,” Barak suggested.

  “They’ll catch you!” Grazyna exclaimed. “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I could go to Geneva, or Ewa...”

  “What are they saying?” Amelia asked.

  Grazyna told her of her friends’ despair and their mad plan to go to Geneva and tell people what was happening in the Warsaw ghetto.

  “I could go,” Amelia said in a faint voice.

  “You? Yes... maybe you could get to Geneva more easily than we could,” Grazyna replied.

  They discussed the question for a while. When only an hour was left before they had to leave the ghetto, Szymon
came back. He was exhausted, with a grimace of pain on his lips.

  “I couldn’t do anything, the poor man died,” he said. Then he took Grazyna’s hand and looked at her tenderly. He loved her and admired her bravery. She was a woman who was happy to risk her life to help him, and not just him, but his people, the Jews of the ghetto.

  Grazyna was the soul of this little group of resistance to the Nazis that was made up of other young people like her. She always played down the importance of what she did, but she was risking her life, especially because her group, as Szymon knew all too well, was passing information to the British.

  “It’s time,” Ewa said, looking impatiently at the clock.

  They stood up slowly. None of them liked saying goodbye.

  “I’ll expect you in a couple of days,” Sarah reminded them.

  “We will try,” Tomasz said.

  Barak was the one delegated to take them back to the drain through the shadows of the night. They had to wait for a patrol to pass, then they lifted the drain cover and descended quickly into the underground, praying that Piotr would be waiting for them at the other end.

  Amelia was miserable, and walked without paying any attention to the rats that ran away when they heard the footsteps of intruders in the sewer. Not that she did not feel scared, but she was too affected by what she had seen and heard to care about her own fears.

  The way back seemed shorter than the way out, although there was a moment in the darkness where Tomasz appeared to lose track of which path they should take; they arrived at the time agreed upon at the drain cover where they thought Piotr would be waiting for them.

  Tomasz gave two light taps on the drain cover and it was immediately lifted up. Piotr was there, impatient.

  “You’re ten minutes late,” he complained.

  “I’m sorry,” Tomasz said.

  “I have to go back to the countess. I said that I was going to the bathroom and I don’t think that she’ll believe that I’ve been there all this time,” he said, nervously. “Also, I don’t know why, but it seems like there have been more patrols than ever tonight.”